Latest Microsoft Blogs

This morning we released some fantastic enhancements to Windows Azure: Dev/Test in the Cloud : MSDN Use Rights, Unbeatable MSDN Discount Rates, MSDN Monetary Credits BizTalk Services : Great new service for Windows Azure that enables EDI and EAI integration in the cloud Per-Minute Billing and No Charge for Stopped VMs : Now only get charged for the exact minutes of compute you use, no compute charges for stopped VMs SSL Support with Web Sites : Support for both IP Address and SNI based SSL bindings on custom web-site domains Active Directory : Updated directory sync utility, ability to manage Office 365 directory tenants from Windows Azure Management Portal Free Trial : More flexible Free Trial offer There are so many improvements that I’m going...

ASP.NET has included support for "friendly URLs" for a while now. ASP.NET MVC has always supported friendly URLs and more recently, so has Web Forms. That means if you don't want to have the .aspx extension, you certainly don't have to. However, there's a LOT of existing legacy apps out there as well as apps that you may not have full control over. For example, there's a site that I want to influence but it's got dozens (hundreds) of links to foo.html and bar.html existing pages. Legacy (n): A super-fancy way of saying "already exists." What I want to do is kind of sloppy and I'm doing it for aesthetic reasons. I'll hopefully get around to updating the site's links later and know that future...

I hope you've updated to Visual Studio 2012.2 and picked up Web Essentials because we're continuing to add goodness all the time. As we march forward with the One ASP.NET vision , so does the community. One of the major goals has been to make it easier for the community to not only make templates but also live alongside ASP.NET templates as peers. This has been historically hard. It's still too complex, in fact, but it's easier than before . I'm hoping that one day soon making templates will be as easy as making and sharing NuGet packages . Not only is most of ASP.NET open source , but so are the Azure SDKs, NuGet and more. However, there's a large and rich world of open source frameworks and projects that some companies...

I've been looking for ways to save money running my (now 12) websites in the cloud lately. Getting insights from logs has been helpful, but I really want more details as to what my app is doing so that I might do less of it. Remember the secret of scaling an application. Have your app do as little as possible. If you do nothing, you can scale infinitely. I like to use tools like Glimpse to profile my apps, check database calls, and explore what's really going on. If you like application insights you may be familiar with New Relic . They are a clever system that profiles apps of all kinds, including sites ASP.NET and Azure. I tweeted this afternoon for folks to hit my site and help me test New Relic. My lovely friends on Twitter promptly...

I’m excited to announce the release of WebMatrix 3.  WebMatrix is a free, lightweight web development tool we first introduced in 2010 , and which provides a great, focused web development experience for ASP.NET, PHP, and Node.js.   Today’s release includes a ton of great new features.  You can easily get started by downloading it, and watching an introduction video: Some of the highlights of today’s release include deep Windows Azure integration, source control tooling for Git and TFS, and a new remote editing experience.  Windows Azure Integration With WebMatrix 3, we are making it really easy to move to the cloud.  The first time you launch WebMatrix 3, there’s an option to sign into Windows Azure.  You...

There's a great website called http://whoownsmyavailability.com that serves as a reminder to me (and all of us) that external dependencies are, in fact, external. As such, they are calculated risks with tradeoffs. CDNs are great, but for those minutes or hours that they go down a year, they can be super annoying. I saw a tweet today declaring that the ASP.NET Content Delivery Network was down. I don't work for the CDN team but I care about this stuff (too much, according to my last performance review) so I turned twitter to figure this out and help diagnose it. The CDN didn't look down from my vantage point. I searched for things like "ajax cdn,"microsoft cdn," and "asp.net cdn down" and looked at the locations...

We’ve seen a huge adoption of ASP.NET Web API since its initial release.  In February we shipped the ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 Update – which added a number of additional enhancements to both Web API and the other components of ASP.NET.  The ASP.NET Team has been hard at work on developing the next set of features (lots of cool stuff coming).  One of the great things about this work has been how the team has used the open source development process – which we announced we were adopting last spring - to collaborate even more closely with the community to both validate the features early, as well as enable developers in the community to directly contribute to the development of them. Below are some updates on two of the great...

If you’ve ever tried to test Orchard part drivers, you may have been blocked by the fact that the methods on drivers are protected. That, fortunately, doesn’t mean they are untestable. Those methods are still accessible through explicit interface implementations. In particular, drivers implement IContentPartDriver, which is defined as follows. public interface IContentPartDriver : IDependency { DriverResult BuildDisplay(BuildDisplayContext context); DriverResult BuildEditor(BuildEditorContext context); DriverResult UpdateEditor(UpdateEditorContext context); void Importing(ImportContentContext context); void Imported(ImportContentContext context); void Exporting(ExportContentContext context); void Exported(ExportContentContext context); IEnumerable<ContentPartInfo>...

I really like jQuery’s pattern of attribute getters and setters. They are fluent and work really well with HTML and XML DOMs. If you specify a value in addition to the name, it’s setting, otherwise it’s getting. In C#, we have an OK API for XML, XElement, but it’s not as easy to use as jQuery’s attr methods. It is also missing the flexibility of Javascript with regards to parameter types. To recreate the simplicity of attr in C#, I built a set of extension methods for the most common simple types: var el = new XElement("node"); el.Attr("foo", "bar") .Attr("baz", 42) .Attr("really", true); var answer = el.Attr("baz"); The element built by this code looks like this: <node foo="bar"...

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/ranganh/archive/2013/04/07/teched-india-data-exposing-azure-mobile-services-through-web-api.aspx For those who attended my session at TechEd India 2013 , one of the topics I presented was, on Azure Mobile Services. I also presented on new enhancements to ASP.NET with the Visual Studio 2012 Fall Update. As a mixture of both the sessions, I mentioned about building a Web API feed for Tech Ed Data that could be consumed through Azure Mobile Services. If you are new to Azure Mobile Services, you can read up about the same here Azure Mobile Services is best consumed through client apps such as Windows 8, iOS and Android Apps. Recently, we also launched the HTML5 Apps template for Azure Mobile Services...